Check out the website: https://lenspoliticalnotes.com Look at the recent Political Notes and Len’s Letters on the website. Political Note #341 US and the World – Blinken, Thomas-Greenfield, and Sullivan, Poliltical Note #336 GEORGIA, GEORGIA, GEORGIA (See below how to help win the two Georgia elections and turn the US Senate blue.)
113020 Political Note #342 Protecting the US from the World – Homeland Security
2020 General election – Getting ready to govern
Joe Biden is gradually introducing who we will be governed by. Asked why he was beginning with National Security Teams, Joe Biden answered “Because it is National Security.”. This team, like Joe Biden’s other teams, are a mixture of old hands he has relied on for years and old hands the country has relied on for years. Will there be some new faces popping up? Not so far.
Secretary of Homeland Security
Alejandro Mayorkas
Joe Biden has nominated Alejandro Mayorkas to be Secretary of Homeland Security. The Secretary of Homeland Security oversees an enormous Department. More than 20 agencies were transferred from various Departments when the Department was created:
- Oversight of US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement was transferred from Treasury and Justice to eventually become the merged entity — US Customs and Border Protection. This is largest law enforcement agency in the Department of Homeland Security. INS inspectors were not included in the merger. They became part of ICE,
- Oversight of the remaining border protection responsibilities eventually became Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which is responsible for interior immigration enforcement.
- The Federal Protective Service of the General Services Administration became the Management Directorate, the uniformed police of the Homeland Security Department.
- The Transportation Security Administration was transferred from the Transportation Department, The TSA oversees the screeners in airports, the armed Federal Air Marshalls on planes, and mobile teams of dog handlers that search for explosives.
- The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center was transferred from the Treasury Department to Homeland Security. It runs a half dozen training centers around the country and oversees international law enforcement training centers.
- The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service of the Agriculture Department became part of US Customs and Border Protection (see #1 above).
- The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) which was not part of any cabinet office became a part of Homeland Security.
- The Strategic National Stockpile and the National Disaster Medical System had been part of the Department of Health and Human Services were eventually reassigned to Homeland Security. The SNS has supplies in 12 secret locations. The NDMS is responsible for disaster-related medical care. Both agencies are required to coordinate with Health and Human Services.
- The Nuclear Incident Response Team of the Energy Department, the Domestic Energy Support Team of the Justice Department, the Center for Domestic Preparedness of the FBI were abolished.Their responsibilities were distributed within Homeland Securities.
- Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate took over the Energy Department’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Countermeasures Programs and the Environmental Measurements Laboratory, the Defense Department’s National Biological Warfare Defense Analysis Center, and the Agriculture Department’s Plum Island Animal Disease Center.
- Homeland Security’s Office of Cybersecurity and Communications, National Programs and Preparedness Directorate, and US Computer Emergency Readiness Team took the responsibilities of the GSA’s Federal Computer Incident Response Center and the Defense Department’s National Communication System.
- Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination and its Office of Infrastructure Protection took over the responsibility of the FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center and the Energy Department’s Energy Security and Assurance Program.
- The US Coast Guard was under the jurisdiction of the Transportation Department. The Service is now part of Homeland Security,
- The US Secret Service was under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department. The Service is now part of Homeland Security.
Alejandro Mayorkas would have a lot to look after as Secretary of the Homeland Security Department. Fortunately for him and for us he knows the Department well. He was Director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Service during Barack Obama’s first term office and Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security for nearly three years during Barack Obama’s second term of office.
As a Director, he focused his agency on fraud detection and national security. He made the agency more transparent and more accessible to the public. His policies made it quicker and easier for people to apply for and obtain US citizenship. He developed and implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy which, sadly, has remained subject to administrative action. Mayorkas has been criticized by opponents of DACA but was widely praised for the rescue of orphaned children after the Haitian earthquakes. He admitted that maximum number allowed of crime victims. When considered for Deputy Secretary, he was accused of favoring Green Cards for wealthy investors in a Las Vegas casino and EB-5 visas in a way that favored a Democratic governor. Mayorkas denied allegations and was confirmed on a party line vote.
As Deputy Secretary, Mayorkas was described as having been involved in every aspect of the Department’s responsibility, with a particular focus on dealing with cybercrime. He was an efficient manager and ahead of his time in seeing where problematic crimes would come from.
Mayorkas is a Cuban-American. His family made a stop in Miami, but continued on to Los Angeles where Alejandro Mayorkas grew up. A Cuban Sephardic Jew, his father had owned a steel wool factory then became a refugee from the Cuban revolution. His wife, Alejandro’s mother was twice a refugee. She and her family, Romanian Jews, came to Cuba to escape the Holocaust in the 1940s. She left Cuba to come to the United States in the 1960s.
Alejandro Mayorkas has a BA from Berkeley and a JD from Loyola of Los Angeles. In 1989, he became an Assistant US Attorney in the Central District of California, eventually serving as Chief of the General Crimes Division. In 1996, recommended by Senator Feinstein, President Bill Clinton appointed Alejandro Mayorkas the US Attorney for the Central District of California. Thirty-nine years old, he led an office of 240 attorneys prosecuting federal crimes. In 2001, he joined a Los Angeles firm as a litigation partner, led the transition team for Barack Obama’s Justice Department, and ultimately joined the Obama administration.
During the past four years, he was a member of the merged Wilmer Hale law firm. He would return to public service as the perfect appointment for a President who values candidates who know what they are doing and for a Department that craves a chief who is familiar with law enforcement.
Director of National Intelligence
Avril Haines
If confirmed, Avril Haines would be the first woman to serve as the Director of National Intelligence.
Avril Haines was a strong advocate for the appointment of Gina Haspel to be the first woman to serve as head of the CIA. Gina Haspel’s background was what you might expect of someone in intelligence. She was from Kentucky. She attended the University of Kentucky but transferred to complete her BA at the University of Louisville. Her dad was in the US Air Force and Haspel lived in a lot of places. Haspel’s initial work experience was in what some would call women’s work. At Fort Devens, in Massachusetts, she was a civilian library coordinator. She went to Northeastern University in Boston to receive a certificate as a paralegal. And then joined the CIA, initially tp do research.
Avril Haines’ background was different. She was born and grew up in Manhattan. Her mother was an artist, a painter. Her dad was a biochemist and a founder of the medical school of the City University of New York. Avril Haines went to Hunter College High School, a private school on Park Avenue of the Upper East Side of New York. There is not a lot that appears conventional about Avril Haines. John Brennan, the CIA Head who hired her as Deputy Director said: “It’s clear that she has eclectic interests. Even, you know, bohemian.”
Avril Haines took a gap year after she finished high school. She studied at a high level judo school in Tokyo and now has a brown belt. Her undergraduate school, the University of Chicago, seems conventional for a very bright young woman. She majored in theoretical physics and met her future husband — David Davighi. He was an instructor, but not at Chicago. He was a flight instructor in New Jersey. She had taken some time off to learn to fly. While studying at Chicago, she worked as a car mechanic. What she learned came in handy when she and Davighi built an airplane they hoped to fly across the Atlantic. They got as far as the Atlantic Provinces of Canada.
She and Davighi left for Maryland when she enrolled in a PhD program at Johns Hopkins. That didn’t last long. In the gentrifying Fells Point neighborhood, she and her husband opened a café named Café Adrian after her mother, who had died when Avril Haines was a teenager. They bought a closed bar, sold books, and led evening readings in erotica.
There was a consequence to owning that café. In addition to heading the Fells Point Business Association, Avril Haines became an advocate for freedom of speech. That interest led to Georgetown’s Law School. She graduated in 2001, worked at the Hague Conference on International Law and clerked in the sixth circuit of the US Court of Appeals (there’s a connection to Kentucky).
Avril Haines went from clerking to working for the State Department’s legal office. She worked briefly with Joe Biden as the Deputy Chief Counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which Biden chaired. She left the Senate to join the Obama administration, working in the State Department and then as a White House national security deputy legal counsel. Initially nominated to be the legal advisor to the State Department, President Obama withdrew the nomination to propose her as Deputy Director of the CIA.
Avril Haines would not be the choice of the ACLU for the position of DNI. She overruled the CIA Inspector General and refused to discipline CIA personnel for hacking the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee which was investigating torture by the CIA. She was involved in redacting material from the Committee’s report. The ACLU has also criticized the Obama administration’s policy on the use of drones for targeted assassinations, which work she was involved in.
The ACLU would agree, Avril Haines is a clear upgrade from Trump’s highly politicized former Congressman John Ratcliffe who she will replace. Whatever bohemian tendencies she may have, for good or for ill, she fits with American intelligence. With two co-authors, she wrote in Foreign Policy, “Politicized intelligence …. simply reinforces preexisting beliefs, depriving leaders of a foundation for developing sound policy. That is why intelligence analysts are trained, from the very outset of their careers, in presenting objective analysis, and why the intelligence community has institutional safeguards, including ombudsmen and inspectors general, to push back against pressure that leads to bias and politicization of intelligence analysis.”
National Security Advisor
Jake Sullivan
Start with Jake Sullivan’s wife. After graduating from law school, she clerked for Merrick Garland, then for Justice Steven Breyer. After clerking, she was a senior political advisor to Joe Lieberman and had s similar role with Senator John McCain. This is American meritocratic political royalty.
(An aside. This evening, with my wife, I watched the episode of The Crown about royal relatives with diminished capacity who were placed in an asylum. This same evening, the Iranians condemned the US and Israel for the assassination of their foremost nuclear scientist.)
Jake Sullivan’s signature accomplishment was as one of three American officials who met with Iranian officials to paved the way for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the agreement with Iran intended to end Iran’s nuclear weapon program. For making this agreement possible, does Jake Sullivan deserve to be recognized as an American policy royal or should he be hidden away as a defective?
Born in Burlington Vermont, raised in Minneapolis, the son of an academic at the University of Minnesota and a guidance counselor, Jake Sullivan went to Yale and graduated summa. In between his BA and JD from Yale, he turned down a Marshall to be a Rhodes Scholar and earned an MPhil from Magdalen at Oxford. After law school, he clerked in the US Court of Appeals and then for Justice Stephen Breyer at the US Supreme Court. He briefly practiced law in Minneapolis before becoming chief counsel to Senator Amy Klobuchar.
In 2008, he worked first for Hillary Clinton and, after he became the nominee, for Barack Obama. When Hillary became Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan became her Deputy Chief of Staff and then the State Department’s Director of Policy Planning. After Hillary stepped down at the end of Obama’s first term, Jake Sullivan became Vice President Joe Biden’s principal security aide. He left to teach at Yale and to join the world of overlapping private sector entities interested in foreign policy. He’s back in the public sector now as Joe Biden’s Advisor on National Security.
VOLUNTEERING FOR GEORGIA
There are many ways to help. Give money. Write postcards. Write texts. Make phone calls. Help get the vote out. Go directly to website of the Democratic candidates for US Senator. Go to Fair Fight. It is a national organization, founded by Stacey Abrams who, but for voter suppression, would have been the Democratic Governor of Georgia today. Or go to one of the numerous organizations that organizes get out the vote efforts by contacting voters directly.
Check out Political Note #336 GEORGIA AND THE US SENATE for more information about these two run off elections.
Suggestions are below:
Helping Jon Ossoff
Jon Ossoff Website: https://electjon.com’
Helping Raphael Warnock
Raphael Warnock Website: https://warnockforgeorgia.com
Helping Stacey Abrams help them both
FairFight Website: https://fairfight.com
Other organizations through which you can send postcards, text, make phone calls
Vote Forward Website: https://votefwd.org
Postcards to Voters Website: PostcardsToVoters.orgOR email to: join@TonytheDemocrat.org
OR text “Join” at 341-444-2229
You can get postcards directly at the post office (though they may have run out) or via https://www.usps.com
You can also get postcards at https://www.etsy.com/shop/maryhawkins
Daily Kos Georgia volunteer opportunities: https://actn.et/DJPuPWi0
The Andrew Goodman Foundation makes a particular effort to register young voters. If you are thinking about giving money this is a worthy alternative: https://andrewgoodman.org
